College and Research Libraries


for low-priced books, side by side but not in 
competition with the existing market for high-
er-priced books. They conclude that people 
will buy books that interest them, without 
too much regard for price (does this account 
for the $10 price set on their own volume!). 

The authors recommend that studies of 
this kind be repeated at intervals of a year 
or two. Librarians will agree that no one 
survey in this field can be regarded as defini-
tive. Indeed, so fast have world events 
moved, that the data for this study, collected 
between May 21 and June 8, 1945, were ob-
solete before publication. They were gath-
ered in the closing moments of the pre-atomic 
age, just after V-E Day, but before the bomb 
fell on Hiroshima. Moreover, they were ob-
tained while millions of American men whose 
reading interests and habits are known to have 
been materially affected by their military ex-
perience were still overseas. Although some 

adjustment was made in the sampling quotas, 
no attempt was made to secure data from this 
large and influential group of readers. Nor 
is any reference made in the interpretation of 
the findings to relevant information about 
American service men gathered by others. 

Compared with such studies as Wilson's 
Geography of Reading, W a p l e s ' People and 
Print, and W a p l e s and T y l e r ' s What People 
Want to Read About, the present survey can-
not but appear superficial, especially with 
respect to interpretation of findings. The 
authors seem unaware that other studies of 
"people and books" have been conducted by 
highly competent investigators. They make 
no effort to relate their findings to those ob-
tained in other surveys. In fact, they make 
no reference whatever to any of the literature 
in this field. The book is attractively printed 
and bound but contains neither bibliography 
nor index.—Alice I. Bryan. 

Little Magazines 

The Little Magazine: A History and a Bib-
liography. By Frederick J . Hoffman, 
Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. 
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 
1946. ix, 44OP. 
Presumably, there could be no little maga-

zines until first there were big ones. The 
authors of this book point out that the little 
magazine movement (if it may be called that) 
began about 1910. Its beginnings, then, coin-
cide with the end of the muckraking era, 
which, if it did nothing else, established the 
permanent place in America of the popular, 
large-circulation magazine; the number of 
readers of Munsey's, McClure's, Everybody's 
increased by the hundreds of thousands under 
the pressure of new journalistic techniques, 
but when muckraking died the tremendous 
circulations remained and presently grew even 
larger. It seems more than a coincidence that 
in the second decade of the twentieth century 
the little magazine began to feed on a vigor-
ous and sometimes ostentatious opposition to 
bigness. 

Of this relationship, Hoffman-Allen-Ulrich 
make nothing at all. Instead, they point out 
a very creditable relationship to the later 
history of publishing; 80 per cent of the au-
thors of literary worth in our time, they say, 

were first published in the little magazines. 
It is only fair to add, however, that they de-
fine "little" as something more than a matter 
of size. True, the little magazine lived a 
precarious, hand-to-mouth existence. Often 
its only subscribers were its contributors (par-
ticularly if you include "would-be" contribu-
tors). Sometimes it died a thousand deaths 
before its final collapse. And collapse, of 
course, it always did in the end, for if it lived 
on it was no longer to be considered a little 
magazine. But they make the further distinc-
tion that the little magazine published experi-
mental writing and went in for the latest 
literary thing. Like a number of the editors 
they are writing about, they are inclined to 
prefer the term "advance guard" to "little." 
The distinction is useful though it may be 
argued. 

In the history which makes up a good half 
of the volume, little magazines are divided 
into six classes—poetry, leftist, regional, ex-
perimental, critical, and eclectic. Chapters 
on each type are interspersed with chapters 
on the historical development of the genre. 
Some of the magazines to receive extended 
t r e a t m e n t are The Double Dealer, The Little 
Review, Poetry, The Seven Arts, Broom. 
The Partisan Review is presented as a little 

OCTOBER, 1946 371 



magazine that has grown into something else. 
The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, 
The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and 
The Virginia Quarterly Review are described 
as "fellow travelers" of little magazines. Not 
mentioned at all, not anywhere in the book, 
are such magazines as The American Scholar, 
The Antioch Review, Science and Society. 

Interesting as many of the details are in 
this section, its ineffective organization and 
incompleteness make it less important (and 
useful to librarians) than the latter half of 
the book, which is given over to a two-part 
bibliography—the much larger first part to 
little magazines, the second to the fellow 
travelers of little magazines—and a first-rate 
index. Reading the history section, for in-
stance, leaves one quite unprepared to dis-
cover that of the 540 little magazines listed 
in the first bibliography, 134 were published 
outside the United States—in such countries 
as England, France, Mexico, Australia, Ire-
land, Germany, Denmark, and Russia. (An 
even larger percentage of the fellow travelers 
are foreign, 43 out of a total of 96.) 

The significance of the geographical spread 
of the little magazine becomes clearer when 
one examines the informative bibliographical 
notes under particular entries. Clearly one 
of the most important results of the little 
magazine—and in some instances it was an 
avowed purpose—was cultural interchange 
between the nations. Translations and criti-
cal estimates of foreign authors have been a 
frequent feature of the little magazine at all 

times in the last thirty-five years. Interest-
ingly enough, the authors list the publication 
date of the first modern little magazine as 
1891. They might well have made something 
of the fact that this was the year in which 
Congress passed the International Copyright 
Bill. For the act gave American literature a 
chance to come of age in relation to other 
literatures; American writers were freed 
from the frequent practice of foreign pirating 
and from the unfair competition that existed 
when foreign fiction and magazine articles 
could be republished here without the consent 
of the authors. The little magazine, more 
than any other part of the publishing industry, 
seems to have taken advantage of the oppor-
tunity. Be that as it may, cultural and liter-
ary interchange with other countries has been 
as much a mark of the little magazine as the 
publication of experimental writing. 

Digging out the elusive facts about brief, 
fly-by-night journals published over half the 
world is not the easiest of tasks, and it was 
a foregone conclusion that a number would 
be missed. Yet I am sure of only one omis-
s i o n — T h e W astebaskeX. published in the M i d -
dle West (at St. Paul?) about the end of 
World W a r I. For the care of detail and 
intensive labor lavished on their bibliography, 
the authors (and presumably Miss Ulrich in 
particular) are to be congratulated. For the 
literary researcher and the librarian they have 
provided a wealth of material which should be 
useful for some time to come.—Paul Bix-
ler. 

Books and Libraries in W a r t i m e 

Books and Libraries in Wartime. Edited by 
Pierce Butler. Chicago, University of Chi-
cago Press, 1945. 
In the spring of 1944 ten lectures were de-

livered under the auspices of the Graduate 
Library School, University of Chicago, to 
describe the impact of war on libraries, books, 
the press, radio, and motion pictures. The 
volume under review, published a year and a 
half after the event, contains eight of the 
lectures, well-edited by Professor Butler. It 
is unfortunate that they did not appear in 
print earlier. Timeliness is of minor im-
portance in presenting results of systematic 

research, but a collection of essays on current 
trends and events loses much of its value by 
delay in publication. T h e fact that some of 
the contributors did pay attention to postwar 
problems, however, renders publication at so 
late a date somewhat more justifiable. 

T o university and research librarians, the 
contributions by MacLeish, Beals, and Butler 
will be of greatest interest. MacLeish's 
statesmanlike address shows how vital re-
search libraries are to the security of a free 
nation. Library materials should not serve 
any particular group but the entire genera-
tion of living men. Such an ideal is to be 

372 COLLEGE AND RESEARCLI LIBRARIES